27 January 2010

I have just discovered that everyone has a name for their spinning wheel. I feel left out. My wheel won't tell me its name. Man, I don't even know if it's a girl or a boy, so I have decided to make a competition out of it.

Name my wheel, and if you win, you'll be rewarded with some lovely Aran-weight homespun, produced on said wheel of mine. I'll post anywhere in the world. It's a merino and silk blend. Lovely and soft.

Please reply in this thread. Throw as many names at me as you like.Closing date for answers will be this time next week. Good luck!

16 January 2010

As I'm sure we're all very much aware right now, Haiti is experiencing an enormous tragedy.

Ravelry, ever the good force in the world has set up a facility for designers to make proceeds of their patterns available to help their chosen charity in their efforts to save lives and repair a shattered country.

I've put up all my most popular patterns and all proceeds from now until the end of March will go to Concern's efforts out there.

I'd urge you, please, even if you never make them, spend a few bob on the patterns available. It's for an incredibly worthy cause. And if you're a designer, please consider donating patterns.

I'm sitting here, poised on the cusp of starting to write out a pattern (which, anyone who knows me can tell you, is a very dangerous position for me to be poised on. I can so easily fall off the cusp and never make it back on again) which will hopefully feature in a magazine soon, but I have suddenly realised that while I can work linked crochet stitches with my eyes closed, I've never set those same eyes on the actual symbol, so I'm putting it out there:

Does anyone know what a linked treble stitch symbol looks like?I'll have to make one up if I can't find out, and that can only lead to confusion down the road.

13 January 2010

I read a lot of blogs, crafty and otherwise.I can't admit to remembering much of what I read, but I've noticed something peculiar; ... now that the Irish Blog Awards 2010 Nominations have started, everyone's going about sprucing up their blogs!

It's like a spring-cleaning frenzy has overtaken the Irish blogosphere. You'd swear the Taoiseach was coming 'round for tea, as we all go about in a whirlwind of fluffing cyber-pillows, and repainting the walls.

Does it ever bother anyone else that the predictive text on a mobile phone chooses to display "armchet" before "crochet"?

I've looked up "Armchet" in a dictionary. It doesn't exist!I've googled "Armchet", and the best it can conceivably come up with is an excerpt from a novel including the word "Arm" as the last word in a sentence, and "Chet" as the beginning of a new sentence.

12 January 2010

If you're anything like me, start-itis is a feature of every waking moment of every day. You walk by someone on the street, think "ooh, I like her hat..." and before you know it you've been in and out of a yarn shop, have picked up yet another 3.5 mm hook, some yarn, and you have a small section of hat done...

I do this way too frequently, so it's nice to know that sometimes, start-itis can be a boon. Like yesterday; my boyfriend brought home a lovely new mp3 player for himself, and discovered that despite its huge memory, and myriad fancy functions, that the pack failed to contain a cover to stop its touch screen from being damaged. My first thought naturally, was to rifle through my stash-memory to see what I had in order to make a cozy. Start-itis in action, if you will. And then I remembered, "hadn't I started a new pair of Oxidises in green a while back?" and "wasn't it languishing around un-finished?" The answers were "Yes", and "Yes, indeed". So, the half-finished glove suddenly became a finished mp3 cozy, complete with fastening button.

11 January 2010

This is Boyne, a new, super fast pattern, now available. It uses one skein of lovely Aysen, is cozy, warm, soft and squidgy, and best of all, it's available on my new website, which I'm happy to say, is looking a little more polished every day.

09 January 2010

I've cracked out the best teacup, opened a brand-new packet of chocolate digestives and cut a ribbon in two in celebration of my new website!

I thought it was high time I had a place to put the non-bloggy things that have begun to clog up my poor blog, so I took off my crochet design hat, and popped on my webdesign hat, used my 8-year's out-of-date html knowledge and created this website.

It's a work in progress, but for now, I'm just glad all the images are showing up, and that the shop works.

If you drop by, please have a bickie and let me know if you see anything amiss.